Eth News and Links
Mainnet
- Proposal to prioritize turning off PoW
- Latest core devs call. Beiko’s notes: London upgrade fork will be 1559 and 3404 (mostly removing gas refunds). Turning off PoW preferred for the q4 2021 upgrade fork.
- Turbogeth latest alpha release is Berlin ready
- New bugfix client releases for Berlin upgrade fork: Besu v21.1.2, OpenEthereum v3.2.1
- MiMC hashing using EVM384. Lower gas cost than Circom, might need a setup mechanism to deal with Montgomery multiplication quirks
- Scalable gossip for state network
- Lakshman’s state size management explainer as to why verkle trees and epochal state expiry is currently the plan
EIPs/Standards
- EIP3382: hardcoded gas limit
- EIP3404: overhaul SLOAD/SSTORE costs and refunds
- EIP3403: remove gas refund except when changing SSTORE value to 0
Proof of Stake
- Weak subjectivity checkpoint explainer, how this enables fast PoS sync
- Long-term plan to upgrade to Casper CBC, possibly needing faster crypto
- Request for security and testing proposals. Deadline April 20
- Single secret leader election explainer – keep the block producer secret to thwart attacks
- Lodestar’s plan to become an eth2 light client in your browser
- Stakers: remember to update your nodes for the Berlin fork upgrade (no link)
Layer2
- zkmoney: Aztec launches zk-zkrollup with private transactions, currently with a 1 ETH transaction cap. More on the zk-zk architecture with TurboPLONK
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Stuff for developers
- WalletConnect v1.4, dynamic registry for mobile linking, 80kb modal
- Fork of Maker’s multicall, fast batched rpc calls for your dapp, 1 line of code integration
- Integrate ENS with
ReverseRecordto return multiple ENS names in a function call - Fundamentals of gas tokens (until London fork renders them useless)
- Tutorial on building an AMM using StarkWare’s Cairo language
- Restoring a buggy “this artwork is always on sale” by selling it to a new contract
- Sign of the times: guides to create and deploy an NFT from OpenZeppelin and Quiknode
Security/incidents
- Cream and Pancake victim of a DNS hijacking
- A governance attack on True Seigniorage Dollar
Ecosystem
- MetaMask v9.2 adds multiple hardware wallet acounts
- DuneAnalytics v2, much faster and auto refresh
- Flashbots now have 12% of hashpower, bundle simulation now in ethers and web3py
- Rescuing tokens in a compromised account using Flashbots
- Quantifying realized extractable value, an MEV framework
- Attacking the attackers: tricky ERC20 reaps 130 ETH from sandwich attackers and sandwich attackers are sandwiching sandwichers
Enterprise
- Gartner Supply Chain Breakthrough of the Year award: Microsoft’s e2e item tracability solution built on Ethereum
- Meitu buys a second round of $22m in ETH and $18m in BTC
Application layer
- Sotheby’s to auction Archillect/Murat Pak artwork
- MetaKovan drops pseudonymity, funds five $100k scholarships for storytellers
- Patrick Mahomes sells NFTs, following Gronk making almost 2m
- Mark Cuban to sell MavPunks, Charmin is selling NFT(P)
- Mandalas: autogenerated bitmaps on bonding curve; no backend, it’s all onchain (I bought one)
- Showtime: a museum/social layer for NFT cryptoart
- USDC tops 10b, Maker with a proposal to raise ETH debt ceiling from 2.5b to 15b
Regulation/business/tokens
- FATF aims to kill DeFi with insanely restrictive AML guidance
- Bank of America: DeFi is more disruptive than Bitcoin
- Reef calls out FTX/Alameda for a token flip deal gone bad. Rekt sides with Reef
- Tyler Cowen: the NFT craze makes sense
- Justin Drake’s Eth as ultrasound Money meme continues to pick up steam as fee burning should exceed issuance
- Vlad Zamfir sues over rights to the Casper name
General
- Vitalik’s “how bulletproof-style polynomial commitments work” visual explainer
- Groth: non-interactive distributed keygen and resharing
- Nvidia driver update accidentally unlocked RTX3060 for Eth mining
- Honeybee: speed up Intel Processor Trace for faster coverage-guided fuzzing
- Phone numbers in crypto considered harmful: a hacker got all my text messages for $16
Job Listings
- ethereum.org is hiring a front end dev
- Building blockchains with ChainSafe. Join us! Rust, Golang, Solidity, TS
- Junior devs: Nethermind is looking for junior Solidity, data analysts, nodeJs devs
- Nomic Labs is hiring a senior dev and an engineering manager
- New DeFi protocol Tokemak seeks Solidity and Frontend devs. Attractive comp
- Powerloom Protocol is looking for Distributed Systems Engineers in Bangalore
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Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-march-21-2021/
Dates of Note
Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):
- Mar 25 – Gitcoin CLR matching grants round ends (ahem: Week in Eth News)
- Mar 27 – Ethstaker’s “learn to stake” workshop
- Apr 9 – May 14 – ETHGlobal’s Scaling Ethereum hackathon
- April 14 – Berlin upgrade fork (testnets: Ropsten Mar 10, Goerli Mar 17, Rinkeby Mar 24)
- April 16 – Rollup community grant applications due
- April 20 – deadline for beacon chain security and testing RFP
- April 22 – Ethereum in the Enterprise 2021
- May 14 – papers due for WoSCA 2021
- Jul 20-22 – EthCC4 (Paris)
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